- DIRECTOR:
Andrei Tarkovsky
- ACTORS:
Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk, Jüri Järvet, Vladislav Dvorzhetsky, Nikolai Grinko, Olga Barnet, Anatoly Solonitsyn, Sos Sargsyan
- PLOT:
A psychologist visits a space station orbiting a planet that can manifest physical replications of people from human memories.
- EVALUATION:
For people who think that 2001: A Space Odyssey is too fast-paced and comprehensible comes a film that genuinely feels like a journey to another planet, both in strangeness and duration.
- WRITING:
Based on a novel that I will never read by Stanisław Lem and less obnoxious than Stalker, at least.
- FILMING:
Occasionally beautiful with outstanding set design and never hesitating to show five minutes of footage when one would have sufficed. (Surely that drive through Tokyo is a warning to the audience about what they're getting into.)
- BEST PART:
Either the recorded session in which a former Solaris cosmonaut (Dvorzhetsky) relates seeing a huge child on the planet or the film's many entrancing glimpses of the planet's surface.
- TRIVIA:
Apparently Stanisław Lem also didn't like this movie.
- STINGER:
An unexpected dwarf tries to escape from one of the rooms on the station.
